Business

As Big Tech builds AI data centers at record pace, carbon emissions are set to skyrocket

Published

5 months ago

July 3, 2025

Welcome to Eye on AI! In this edition...Ilya Sutskever says he is now CEO of Safe Superintelligence…Chinese AI companies erode U.S. dominance…Meta’s AI talent bidding war heats up…Microsoft’s sales overhaul goes all-in on AI.

As an early-summer heat wave blanketed my home state of New Jersey last week, it felt like perfect timing to stumble across a sobering new prediction from Accenture: AI data centers’ carbon emissions are on track to surge 11-fold by 2030.

The report estimates that over the next five years, AI data centers could consume 612 terawatt-hours of electricity—roughly equivalent to Canada’s total annual power consumption—driving a 3.4% increase in global carbon emissions.

And the strain doesn’t stop at the power grid. At a time when freshwater resources are already under severe pressure, AI data centers are also projected to consume more than 3 billion cubic meters of water per year—a volume that surpasses the annual freshwater withdrawals of entire countries like Norway or Sweden.

Unsurprisingly, the report—Powering Sustainable AI—offers recommendations for how to rein in the problem and prevent those numbers from becoming reality. But with near-daily headlines about Big Tech’s massive AI data center buildouts across the U.S. and worldwide, I can’t help but feel cynical. The urgent framing of an AI race against China doesn’t seem to leave much room—or time—for serious thinking about sustainability.

Just yesterday, for example, OpenAI agreed to rent a massive amount of computing power from Oracle data centers as part of its Stargate initiative, which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. The additional capacity from Oracle totals about 4.5 gigawatts of data center power in the U.S., according to Bloomberg reporting. A gigawatt is akin to the capacity from one nuclear reactor and can provide electricity to roughly 750,000 houses.

And this week, Meta was reported to be seeking to raise $29 billion from private capital firms to build AI data centers in the U.S., while already building a $10 billion AI data center in Northeast Louisiana. As part of that deal, the local utility, Entergy, will supply three new power plants.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made his intentions clear: The U.S. must rapidly expand AI data center construction or risk falling behind China in the race for AI dominance. Speaking on the Dwarkesh Podcast in May, he warned that America’s edge in artificial intelligence could erode unless it keeps pace with China’s aggressive build-out of data center capacity and factory-scale hardware.

“The U.S. really needs to focus on streamlining the ability to build data centers and produce energy,” Zuckerberg said. “Otherwise, we’ll be at a significant disadvantage.”

The U.S. government seems to be aligned with that sense of urgency. David Sacks, now serving as the White House AI and Crypto Czar, has also underscored that energy and data center expansion are central to America’s AI strategy—leaving little room for sustainability concerns.

On his All In podcast in February, Sacks argued that Washington’s “go-slow” approach to AI could strangle the industry. He emphasized that the U.S. needs to clear the way for infrastructure and energy development—including AI data centers—to keep pace with China.

In late May, he went further, saying that streamlining permitting and expanding power generation are essential for AI’s future—something he claimed has been “effectively impossible under the Biden administration.” His message: the U.S. needs to race to build faster.

Accenture, meanwhile, is urging its clients to responsibly grow and engineer its AI data centers in a bid to balance growth with environmental responsibility. It is offering a new metric, that it calls the Sustainable AI Quotient (SAIQ), to measure the true costs of AI in terms of money invested, megawatt-hours of energy consumed, tons of CO₂ emitted and cubic meters of water used. The firm’s report says the metric will help organizations answer a basic question: “What are we actually getting from the resources we’re investing in AI?” and allow that enterprise to measure its performance across time.

I spoke to Matthew Robinson, managing director of Accenture Research and co-author of the report, who emphasized that he hoped Accenture’s sobering predictions would be proven wrong. “They kind of take your breath away,” he said, explaining that Accenture modeled future energy consumption from the expected number of installed AI chips adjusted for utilization and the additional energy requirements of data centers. That data was combined with regional data on electricity generation, energy mix and emissions, while water use was assessed based on AI data center energy consumption and how much water is consumed per unit of electricity generated.

“The point really is to open the conversation around the actions that are available to avert this pathway—we don’t want to be right here,” he said. He would not comment on the actions of specific companies like OpenAI or Meta, but said that overall, clearly more effort is needed to avert the rise in carbonisation fueled by AI data centers while still allowing for growth.

Accenture’s recommendations certainly make sense: Optimize the power efficiency of AI workloads and data centers with everything from low-carbon energy options to cooling innovations. Use AI thoughtfully, by choosing smaller AI models, and better pricing models for incentivizing efficiency. And ensure better governance over AI sustainability initiatives.

It’s hard to imagine that the biggest players in the race for AI dominance—Big Tech giants and heavily funded startups—will hit the brakes long enough to seriously address these growing concerns. Not that it’s impossible. Take Google, for example: In its latest sustainability report released this week, the company revealed that its data centers are consuming more power than ever. In 2024, Google used approximately 32.1 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, with a staggering 95.8%—about 30.8 million MWh—consumed by its data centers. That’s more than double the energy its data centers used in 2020, just before the consumer AI boom.

Still, Google emphasized that it’s making meaningful strides toward cleaning up its energy supply, even as demand surges. The company said it cut its data center energy emissions by 12% in 2024, thanks to clean energy projects and efficiency upgrades. And it’s squeezing more out of every watt. Google reported that the amount of compute per unit of electricity has increased about six-fold over the past five years. Its power usage effectiveness (PUE)—a key measure of data center efficiency—is now approaching the theoretical minimum of 1.0, with a reported PUE of 1.09 in 2024.

“Just speaking personally, I’d be optimistic,” said Robinson.

Note: Check out this new Fortune video about my tour of IBM’s quantum computing test lab. I had a fabulous time hanging out at IBM’s Yorktown Heights campus (a midcentury modern marvel designed by the same guy as the St. Louis Arch and the classic TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport) in New York. The video was part of my coverage for this year’s Fortune 500 issue that included an article that dug deep into IBM’s recent rebound.

As I said in my piece, “walking through the IBM research center is like stepping into two worlds at once. There are the steel and glass curves of Saarinen’s design, punctuated by massive walls made of stones collected from the surrounding fields, with original Eames chairs dotting discussion nooks. But this 20th-century modernism contrasts starkly with the sleek, massive, refrigerator-like quantum computer—among the most advanced in the world—that anchors the collaboration area and working lab, where it whooshes with the steady hum of its cooling system.”

With that, here’s the rest of the AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

AI IN THE NEWS

Ilya Sutskever says he is now CEO of Safe Superintelligence, after Daniel Gross steps down to join Meta. Ilya Sutskever, the former OpenAI chief scientist who founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI) with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy a year ago, confirmed that he will now serve as SSI’s CEO after Daniel Gross stepped down. Sustkever posted on X saying: “Daniel Gross’s time with us has been winding down, and as of June 29 he is officially no longer a part of SSI. We are grateful for his early contributions to the company and wish him well in his next endeavor. I am now formally CEO of SSI, and Daniel Levy is President. The technical team continues to report to me. ⁠You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through.” Meta was rumored to have sought to acquire the $32 billion-valued SSI.

Chinese AI companies erode U.S. dominance. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese artificial intelligence companies are gaining ground globally, challenging U.S. supremacy and intensifying a potential AI arms race. Across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, organizations—from multinational banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered to Saudi Aramco—are increasingly adopting large language models from Chinese firms such as DeepSeek and Alibaba as alternatives to U.S. offerings like ChatGPT. Even American cloud giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google now offer access to DeepSeek’s models, despite U.S. government security restrictions on the company’s apps. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT still leads in global adoption—with 910 million downloads versus DeepSeek’s 125 million—Chinese models are undercutting U.S. competition by offering nearly comparable performance at much lower prices.

Meta’s AI talent bidding war heats up. As Mark Zuckerberg rapidly staffs up Meta’s new superintelligence lab, his company has reportedly offered some OpenAI researchers eye-popping pay packages of up to $300 million over four years, with more than $100 million in first-year compensation, Wired reports. The offers, which include immediate stock vesting, have been extended to at least 10 OpenAI employees, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. While Meta’s aggressive recruiting tactics have caught the attention of top talent, some OpenAI staffers told Wired they’re weighing the massive payouts against their potential impact at Meta versus staying at OpenAI. A Meta spokesperson pushed back, claiming reports of the offer sizes are exaggerated. Still, even Meta’s senior engineers typically make around $850,000 per year, with those in higher pay bands earning over $1.5 million annually, according to Levels.FYI data.

Microsoft’s sales overhaul goes all-in on AI. Microsoft’s sales chief, Judson Althoff, is reshaping the company’s sales organization to double down on AI, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider. Althoff’s Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) unit will now focus on embedding Copilot across devices and roles, deepening Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 adoption, winning high-impact AI deals, expanding Azure cloud migration, and strengthening cybersecurity to support AI growth. The memo, sent just one day before Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs—many of which affected Althoff’s sales teams—outlined his vision to make Microsoft “the Frontier AI Firm.” According to Business Insider, this restructuring follows Althoff’s earlier plan to cut the number of sales solution areas in half starting this fiscal year.

FORTUNE ON AI

The new CEO flex: Bragging that AI handles exactly X% of the work —by Sharon Goldman

Sam Altman scoffs at Mark Zuckerberg’s AI recruitment drive and says Meta hasn’t even got their ‘top people’ —by Beatrice Nolan

Figma files for IPO nearly two years after $20 billion Adobe buyout fell through —by Allie Garfinkle

AI CALENDAR

July 8-11: AI for Good Global Summit, Geneva

July 13-19: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Vancouver

July 22-23: Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore. Apply to attend here.

July 26-28: World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Shanghai.

Sept. 8-10: Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Park City, Utah. Apply to attend here.

Oct. 6-10: World AI Week, Amsterdam

Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego

Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend here.

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

$65 Billion

That’s how much U.S. investment in AI companies soared to in the first quarter of this year—a 33% jump from the previous quarter and a staggering 550% increase compared to the quarter before ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, according to PitchBook.

The biggest price tag? Data centers.

The New York Times reports that Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google plan to spend a combined $320 billion on infrastructure this year—more than double what they spent just two years ago. A huge chunk of that will go toward building new data centers to keep up with the exploding demand for AI.

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Business

Connecticut cashes in on Hallmark Movie status to drive kitschy Christmas tourism boom

Published

20 minutes ago

December 14, 2025

Jace Porter

“Christmas at Pemberly Manor” and “Romance at Reindeer Lodge” may never make it to Oscar night, but legions of fans still love these sweet-yet-predictable holiday movies — and this season, many are making pilgrimages to where their favorite scenes were filmed.

That’s because Connecticut — the location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime and others — is promoting tours of the quaint Christmas-card cities and towns featured in this booming movie market; places where a busy corporate lawyer can return home for the holidays and cross paths with a plaid shirt-clad former high school flame who now runs a Christmas tree farm. (Spoiler alert: they live happily ever after.)

“It’s exciting — just to know that something was in a movie and we actually get to see it visually,” said Abby Rumfelt of Morganton, North Carolina, after stepping off a coach bus in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at one of the stops on the holiday movie tour.

Rumfelt was among 53 people, mostly women, on a recent weeklong “Hallmark Movie Christmas Tour,” organized by Mayfield Tours from Spartanburg, South Carolina. On the bus, fans watched the matching movies as they rode from stop to stop.

To plan the tour, co-owner Debbie Mayfield used the “ Connecticut Christmas Movie Trail ” map, which was launched by the wintry New England state last year to cash in on the growing Christmas-movie craze.

Mayfield, who co-owns the company with her husband, Ken, said this was their first Christmas tour to holiday movie locations in Connecticut and other Northeastern states. It included hotel accommodations, some meals, tickets and even a stop to see the Rockettes in New York City. It sold out in two weeks.

With snow flurries in the air and Christmas songs piped from a speaker, the group stopped for lunch at Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre, where parts of the Hallmark films “Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane” and “Rediscovering Christmas” were filmed.

Once home to America’s oldest seed company, the store is located in a historic district known for its stately 1700s and 1800s buildings. It’s an ideal setting for a holiday movie. Even the local country store has sold T-shirts featuring Hallmark’s crown logo and the phrase “I Live in a Christmas Movie. Wethersfield, CT 06109.”

“People just know about us now,” said Julia Koulouris, who co-owns the market with her husband, Spiros, crediting the movie trail in part. “And you see these things on Instagram and stuff where people are tagging it and posting it.”

Christmas movies are big business — and a big deal to fans

The concept of holiday movies dates back to 1940s, when Hollywood produced classics like “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Christmas in Connecticut,” which was actually shot at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California.

In 2006, five years after the launch of the Hallmark Channel on TV, Hallmark “struck gold” with the romance movie “The Christmas card,” said Joanna Wilson, author of the book “Tis the Season TV: The Encyclopedia of Christmas-Themed Episodes, Specials and Made-for-TV Movies.”

“Hallmark saw those high ratings and then started creating that format and that formula with the tropes and it now has become their dominant formula that they create for their Christmas TV romances,” she said.

The holiday movie industry, estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has expanded beyond Hallmark and Lifetime. Today, a mix of cable and broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and direct-to-video producers release roughly 100 new films annually, Wilson said. The genre has also diversified, with characters from a wider range of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQ+ storylines.

The formula, however, remains the same. And fans still have an appetite for a G-rated love story.

“They want to see people coming together. They want to see these romances. It’s a part of the hope of the season,” she said. “Who doesn’t love love? And it always has a predictable, happy ending.”

Hazel Duncan, 83, of Forest City, North Carolina, said she and her husband of 65 years, Owen, like to watch the movies together year-round because they’re sweet and family-friendly. They also take her back to their early years as a young couple, when life felt simpler.

“We hold hands sometimes,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet. We’ve got two recliners back in a bedroom that’s real small and we’ve got the TV there. And we close the doors off and it’s just our time together in the evening.”

Falling in love again… with a state

Connecticut’s chief marketing officer, Anthony M. Anthony, said the Christmas Movie Trail is part of a multipronged rebranding effort launched in 2023 that promotes the state not just as a tourist destination, but also as a place to work and live.

“So what better way to highlight our communities as a place to call home than them being sets of movies?” he said.

However, there continues to be debate at the state Capitol over whether to eliminate or cap film industry tax credits — which could threaten how many more of these movies will be made locally.

Christina Nieves and her husband of 30 years, Raul, already live in Connecticut and have been tackling the trail “little by little.”

It’s been a chance, she said, to explore new places in the state, like the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford, where a scene from “Ghost of Christmas Always” was filmed.

It also inspired Nieves to convince her husband — not quite the movie fan she is — to join her at a tree-lighting and Christmas parade in their hometown of Windsor Locks.

“I said, listen, let me just milk this Hallmark thing as long as I can, OK?” she said.

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Business

Alphabet poised for another paper gain as SpaceX valuation jumps

Published

51 minutes ago

December 14, 2025

Jace Porter

Alphabet Inc. is set to book another sizable paper gain after SpaceX completes a tender offer that effectively values the closely held company at about $800 billion.

SpaceX’s insider share sale was priced at $421 a share, Bloomberg reported Friday, which would mark a sharp jump in valuation from earlier secondary transactions. That is likely to lift the carrying value of Google’s long-standing investment in Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company.

Alphabet, Google’s parent, has been an investor in SpaceX since at least 2015, when it joined Fidelity Investments in a $1 billion funding round for a combined stake of about 10% at the time, Bloomberg has reported.

A representative for Google declined to comment, citing their policy of not disclosing or commenting on individual private holdings.

A similar revaluation boosted Alphabet’s earnings earlier this year. In April, the company disclosed an $8 billion unrealized gain tied to its investment in a private company — widely understood to be SpaceX — after a tender offer late last year valued the company at about $350 billion. That gain helped lift Alphabet’s net income for the March quarter above Wall Street expectations.

While Alphabet does not name individual private holdings in its financial filings, changes in SpaceX’s valuation have previously flowed through earnings as “unrealized gains on non-marketable equity securities.”

With SpaceX’s latest tender implying a much higher valuation, investors will be watching Alphabet’s next earnings report for signs of another accounting boost.

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Business

Twelve people killed in Bondi Beach Hanukkah terror attack

Published

1 hour ago

December 14, 2025

Jace Porter

Twelve people have been killed in Australia’s worst terrorist attack, as gunmen opened fire on Jewish people who had gathered to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on Sunday evening.

The shooting was a “targeted attack” on the Jewish community, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a late-night press conference. He described the incident as an “act of evil anti-Semitism, terrorism that has struck the heart of our nation,” and flagged an uncompromising crackdown on anti-Semitism.

“We will eradicate it,” he said.

Australia’s Jewish population was estimated to be 116,967 in 2021, one of the world’s 10 largest. Bondi, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, is among key Jewish communities in the nation.

One of the gunmen is dead and a second is in a critical condition in the hospital, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters at a media conference, where he designated the incident as a terrorist attack. At least 29 people, including two police officers, were injured and taken to hospitals across Sydney, he added.

The incident is Australia’s deadliest mass-shooting since a lone gunman killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania on April 28, 1996.

“There are nights that tear at our nation’s soul,” Albanese said. “In this moment of darkness, we must be each other’s light.”

The gunmen opened fire just after 6:45 p.m. local time as more than 1,000 people attended the Chanukah by the Sea event on a warm summer evening.

One of the victims said he only arrived in Australia in recent days from Israel, where he had lived for 13 years, to help the Jewish community in Sydney cope with anti-Semitic incidents. Speaking with Channel Nine television, his face bloodied and head swathed in bandages, he said the community would pull even closer together in the wake of the shootings.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. showed footage of two black-clad gunmen firing on people from a footbridge near the beach. In another unconfirmed clip, a bystander is shown tackling and disarming one of the gunmen — actions that New South Wales Premier Chris Minns described as genuinely heroic, saying the intervention likely saved many lives.

An improvised explosive device was found in a car linked to the dead offender, Police Commissioner Lanyon said. Police are also investigating whether there was a third offender, he said.

Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, said the national terror level rating remains at “probable” despite Sunday’s incident.

Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the shootings “are the results of the anti-Semitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years,” adding that “the Australian government, which received countless warning signs, must come to its senses!”

Speaking at an event recognizing the extraordinary achievements of immigrants to Israel at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the shooting was a “cruel attack on Jews who went to light the first candle of Chanukah on Bondi Beach.”

Several synagogues in Australia, along with Jewish businesses and homeowners, have been targeted following the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

In October last year, two masked men torched Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Bondi after dousing it with accelerant. The following month, assailants sprayed anti-Israel graffiti and set a vehicle alight in Woollahra — a suburb with a large Jewish community — damaging more than 10 cars and several buildings.

Last December, offenders broke into the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea, Victoria, and spread accelerant in what police described as a probable terrorist attack. Days later, another graffiti-and-arson attack targeted a street in Woollahra that perpetrators selected because it was considered a Jewish area.

Around the same time, about 20 members of a neo-Nazi group gathered outside a Melbourne government building with a banner reading “Jews hate freedom.”

This year, Albanese said Australia uncovered intelligence that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed at least two of last year’s arson attacks — including the Bondi restaurant and Melbourne synagogue incidents — prompting Canberra to expel Iran’s ambassador, its first such move since World War II.

Gun Crimes

The Bondi attack has refocused attention on gaps in Australia’s gun-control framework, a system often cited internationally as a model. However, it’s still marked by uneven implementation.

A January report from the Australia Institute found that all states and territories fell short on core benchmarks for effective oversight, including transparent data reporting and limits on how many firearms an individual can legally own.

The Australia Institute report also showed how concentrated gun ownership has become: the average license holder owns more than four firearms, and two residents in suburban Sydney hold upward of 300 each.

Using scorecards to rank jurisdictions on measures such as ownership caps and data availability, the Institute assessed New South Wales — home to Sydney — as the strongest performer on transparency, even as broader national shortcomings persist.

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